Silverlight 4 event April 13, release coming later

Microsoft is set to release Silverlight 4, the company’s alternative to Adobe Flash, later this month, the company said Thursday. But first, Microsoft will be holding a launch event April 13.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president for the .NET development platform, will give a keynote at 8 a.m. Tuesday from the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas. There, he’ll be outlining what’s new in Microsoft’s next version of Silverlight.

As Guthrie said at the Professional Developers Conference in November, when Silverlight 4 was released to public beta, the new platform adds official support for the Google Chrome browser. It also fully cooperates with Visual Studio 2010 (to be launched April 12), SharePoint and Office.

He said it also includes the ability to use Flash inside of Silverlight, so an app could play YouTube videos, for example. Webcam, microphone and multicast support is also built in to Silverlight 4.

The release is biggest for developers who want to create Silverlight apps. Since the release of Silverlight 3 in July, Microsoft has been pushing the platform not just as a video player, but as an application runtime. In fact, Microsoft is making Silverlight a main platform for Windows Phone 7 apps.

Additionally, at next week’s National Association of Broadcasters Show in Last Vegas, Microsoft will show off Silverlight Media Framework 2.0, which allows media companies to make complex media players – like the one NBC used for its Olympics coverage – with little coding. More information on that is available here.